Top 51 Black Writer Quotes
#1. The Black writer explains pain to those who inflict it.
Alice Childress
#2. I'm a black writer from Mississippi. That's what I most consider myself.
Kiese Laymon
#3. There's an inherent idea that if a Black executive producer and a Black director are going to do a movie based on a Black writer's book that everybody is going to be Black.
Gabrielle Union
#4. Richard Price got a million dollar advance on one fake film book based on a paragraph outline and is able to seduce gullible White reviewers who know less about ghetto life than he. The New York Times has devoted more space to Price's tourist, ghetto writing than to any Black writer in history.
Ishmael Reed
#5. At one time if you were a black writer you had to be one of the best writers in the world to be published. You had to be great. Now you can be good. Mediocre. And that's good.
Walter Mosley
#6. And besides, I'm not a writer. I don't go to coffeehouses and smoke, wear black, and analyze Sylvia Plath to the point of depression.
Megan McCafferty
#7. It's always hard when you're playing someone for a lot of people out there who are going to see the movie after reading the books. There's a communion between a reader and the writer, so people will have an idea who Sirius Black is and I might not be everyone's idea of that.
Gary Oldman
#8. Every writer has their rituals. For me, it's morning walks along the beach. And then, in my study I have a huge painting of the Black Madonna hung over my desk, and quite a few pictures of Mary around me for inspiration.
Sue Monk Kidd
#9. A reader seldom peruses a book with pleasure until he knows whether the writer of it be a black man or a fair man, of a mild or choleric disposition, married or a bachelor.
Joseph Addison
#10. Despite popular conviction, a writer needn't wear black, be unshaven, sickly and parade around New York's East Village spewing aphorisms and scaring children.
Noah Lukeman
#11. You can win more arguments then you might think as a writer, even though you legally have no recourse, and your script can get muddied and altered in any way possible. You can use reason, logic, and passion to argue persuasively for a case in your favor.
Shane Black
#12. Not long ago, an English writer telephoned me from London, asking questions. One was "What's your alma mater?" I told him, "Books." You will never catch me with a free fifteen minutes in which I'm not studying something I feel might be able to help the black man.
Malcolm X
#13. Black is beautiful .Black isn't power. Knowledge is power. You can be black as a crow or white as snow but if you don't know and you ain't got no dough, you can't go and that's for sho'.
Lewis H. Michaux
#14. I'm not a fast writer, and I find the process of writing a first draft to be painful and frustrating. Usually, I start with a character, a premise, and some image that gives me a particular feeling.
Holly Black
#15. He traced her arched eyebrow. "Every morning when I wake up with you at my side, you're more beautiful than yesterday.
Lindsay McKenna
#16. Write. No amount of self-inflicted misery, altered states, black pullovers or being publicly obnoxious will ever add up to your being a writer. Writers write. On you go.
A. L. Kennedy
#18. The sickness is to sit at the base of the lighthouse staring into nothing. The lighthouse is black, the sea is black, the writer's jacket is also black.
Roberto Bolano
#19. Holly Black is the Real Thing: a gifted writer with a solid grounding in what matters. Her stories are dark and splendid blooms rising from roots sunk deep in myth and tradition.
Ellen Kushner
#20. I'm not a great joke writer, which is odd for a comic to say, but I'm not.
Lewis Black
#21. But when I do book signings and personal appearances, the audiences are mostly white. Growing up here, I expected that and understand it. Black audiences won't come out for a white writer for the most part. It really is just a fact of life.
George Pelecanos
#22. Look how black the sky is, the writer said. I made it that way.
Bret Easton Ellis
#23. He leaned over, catching her lowered gaze. "I'm the present, Darlin'.
Lindsay McKenna
#24. ... your writer of intensities must have very black ink, and a very big pen, with a very blunt nib.
Edgar Allan Poe
#25. It's the same old story. Nothing in this world happens unless white folks says it happens. And therein lies the problem of being a professional black storyteller - writer, musician, filmmaker.
James McBride
#26. As a very young writer - kindergarten through about fifth grade - I most often wrote about black characters. My very early stories were science fiction and fantasy, with kids stowing away on spaceships and a girl named Tilly who was trying to get into the 'Guinness Book of World Records.'
Tananarive Due
#27. No black woman writer in this culture can write "too much". Indeed, no woman writer can write "too much" ... No woman has ever written enough.
Bell Hooks
#28. I don't necessarily self-identify as a writer, 'cause it implies a certain level of intelligence.
Michael Ian Black
#29. I'm so disturbed when my women students behave as though they can only read women, or black students behave as though they can only read blacks, or white students behave as though they can only identify with a white writer.
Bell Hooks
#30. Where history concerns mainly personalities, the drawings become either black or white according to the interests of the writer.
Isaac Asimov
#31. You should never rely on interviews with musicians as being factual. Most of them are mangled and even have made up stuff in them, that is to say, made up stuff by the writer or editor.
Frank Black
#32. You can have a dark heart and be a writer, but you can't have a black one..
John Geddes
#33. I think in life there is only one absolute truth.
Death ... It's the only definitive horizon, sometime it leaps, runs across mountains and vanishes beyond oceans but the closer you get, the more you see and you know it is the final destination, the absolute truth. We are only living to die.
Crystal Evans
#34. When I try to describe myself to God I say, "Lord, remember me? Black? Female? Six-foot tall? The writer?" And I almost always get God's attention.
Maya Angelou
#35. The night it falls
The stars shine through
The inky black
That is the cue
For plot demands
That dreams be sown
The fantasies
I have alone
The words come fast
They flow like wine
I am the midnight writer...
Virginia Alison
#36. During the writer's strike I was walking a line and ran into Jack Black and he said, 'We're doing Airborne 2!', and I asked, 'Are you kidding?', and he said, 'Yeah.' I like 'Airborne,' its very pure.
Seth Green
#37. Someday I would like to be the kind of writer who barrels through a draft, but I can't even seem to barrel through an interview like this, so I imagine I have a long way to go.
Holly Black
#38. Sometimes I'll hear a phrase or a word and write it down in my little black notebook (a writer's best mate), then come back to it and work a plot around it.
Paul Kane
#39. I too have read his version of the facts. Like you and millions of others. And everyone got the picture, right from the start: He had a man's name; my brother had the name of an incident. He could have called him "Two P.M.," like that other writer who called his black man "Friday.
Kamel Daoud
#40. I was challenged to a fistfight by Margo Jefferson, the Pulitzer Prize winner, New York Times writer, who is part of a feminist clique at the Times, which believes that Black men are the principal threat to the women of the world.
Ishmael Reed
#42. I have always been a singer, a writer, and a musician, not as a prodigy or as in a trade handed to me by my parents, but because of an inner voice or maybe a command from beyond reality as it is usually defined.
Frank Black
#43. Suggested Reading Louis Bayard, The Black Tower; Sarah Blake, Grange House; F. G. Cottam, The House of Lost Souls; Michael Cox, The Glass of Time; Mark Frost, The List of Seven; John Harwood, The Ghost Writer; Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale.
Susan Hill
#44. I'm an aspiring writer.' I hate that phrase. You're either a writer or you're not.
Jake Black
#45. How do you paint a writer's block?
Just fill it with fifty shades of black.
Ana Claudia Antunes
#47. Paul Robeson was an athlete, Rutgers valedictorian, lawyer, writer, actor in movies and plays, great voice - a black male doing it all, back when some people thought he shouldn't. One reason I do all the things I do is to break stereotypes that people can only do certain things.
Dhani Jones
#48. 'The Ballad of Black Tom' was written, in part, during the latest round of arguments about H. P. Lovecraft's legacy as both a great writer and a prejudiced man. I grew up worshipping the guy, so this issue felt quite personal to me.
Victor LaValle
#49. I never liked my father. He really was a dullard and misanthrope. My mother and he were married for 22, years and it was an ill match. She encouraged me to be a writer. She opened her home to black friends, and this was the 1950s. She didn't care later when I write about her.
Edmund White
#50. I really think the range of emotions and perceptions I have had access to as a black person and as a female person are greater than those of people who are neither ... So it seems to me that my world did not shrink because I was a black female writer. It just got bigger.
Toni Morrison
#51. I write flawed characters. Ones that do not always make the best decisions and are driven by ambition or lust. They are not black or white, they are in the large space that exists between.
Kevin James Breaux
